Tag: main course
Thai Pork Laab
Thai Pork Laab (ground pork and mint salad)
This is a very quick and easy recipe. It has a great contrast in flavor between the spiciness of the chili flake, the sourness of lime, and the freshness of mint leaves. Plus, it’s a salad made out of pork.Laab is typically served on shredded lettuce with sticky rice or as a wrap with green or red leaf lettuce. Make sure to wash your lettuce.
Servings: 2
Ingredients
- 1 lb ground pork
- 1 tbsp meat seasoning (salt, pepper, garlic, onion)
- 3 branches mint leaves
- 1 tbsp crushed chili flakes
- 1 green onion chopped
- 2 tbsp cilantro chopped
- 2 tbsp lime juice
- 1 large shallot chopped
- 2 tbsp fish sauce
- 2 tbsp crushed toasted rice powder
Instructions
How to make toasted rice powder
- Add 2 tbsp of uncooked rice to a dry skillet.
- Toast on medium heat until brown.
- In either a spice grinder or a mortar and pestal, grind into a powder.
Making the salad
- Cook on medium heat in a skillet the ground pork. Stir in the meat seasoning once browned. Set aside and let cool off.
- In a bowl, mix mint, crushed chili flakes, lime juice, green onion, cilantro, shallots, and fish sauce. Add in the cooled off ground pork. Mix together. Sprinkle the toasted rice powder on the pork salad and mix together some more.
- Serve on top of a bed of shredded lettuce or serve as a lettuce wrap with whole green or red leaf lettuce.
Thai Noodle Soup with Pork Belly
Kuay Jub (Thai noodle soup with pork belly)
Kuay Jub. Thai rice noddle soup with pork belly. As far as I’m concerned, this is the ultimate comfort food. I recently ate this for the first time at my favorite local Thai restaurant, On’s Kitchen, and have never been so satisfied. I went home afterwards and took a nice nap, cradling my filled gut. This is a soup that will make you want to change your undies afterwards. Climactic. While there is a lot of steps and ingredients to make this soup, they are all fairly simple. The pork belly is the only thing that really requires a lot of time to cook. Cooking the belly at 225 first helps render out a lot of the fat. Turning it up to 400 for another 20 minutes will make the skin nice and crispy. If you are good at multitasking, while the pork belly is cooking, fry up the tofu and drain on a paper towel. Hard boil your eggs. Boil your rice noodle flakes. Make your soup stock. Get 2 birds stoned at once.
Servings: 2
Ingredients
Pork Belly
- 2 8 oz skin on pork belly slabs
- 1/4 cup fish sauce
- 1/8 cup vinegar
- 1 tbsp salt
Noodle soup
- rice noodle flakes
- 1 cup bean sprouts
- 2 hard boiled eggs
- 2 cups fried tofu
- 5 cups water
- 3 tbsp light soy sauce
- 1 tbsp dark soy sauce
- 3 tbsp sugar
- 1/2 tbsp 5 spice powder
- 5 minced garlic cloves
- 1 tsp dried black peppercorns
- 1 tsp cilantro stalks diced
- 1/3 lb sliced pork
Garnish
- green onion
- cilantro
- fried garlic
Instructions
Pork Belly
- Mix fish sauce and vinegar together. Add the pork belly. Coat on all side and let marinate for 10 minutes.
- Put pork belly in a baking dish skin side up. Poke slits with a knife on the skin side to help render out the fat and make the skin crispy. Add salt to the skin side.
- Preheat oven to 225. Roast pork belly for 45 minutes. Turn up oven to 400 and roast pork belly for another 20 minutes until skin is crispy. Set aside
Noodle Soup
- In a stock pot, bring water, light and dark soy sauce, 5 spice powder, sugar, garlic, cilantro stalks, and peppercorns to a boil. Turn down to medium heat and add fried tofu and hard boiled eggs. Simmer covered for 15 minutes. Add sliced pork and cook for another 2 minutes.
- While the stock is cooking, soak 2 servings of rice noodle flakes in cold water for 3 minutes. Then add the rice noodle flakes to boling water and cook for 5 minutes. Drain.
Soup Assembly
- Put rice noodle flakes on the bottom. On top of them, in the center, add bean sprouts. On the left side of the sprouts, add chunks of pork belly. On the right side of the sprouts, add chunks of fried tofu from the stock. Take out one of the hard boiled eggs from the stock and slice in half. Put below he bean sprouts.
- Spoon over the soup ingredients the broth with the sliced pork. Garnish the top with green onion, cilantro, and fried garlic.
Sataejjim (Slow Cooker Beef Shanks)
Sataejjim (Slow Cooker Beef Shanks)
This is a very simple low maintenance Korean recipe of one of my favorite cuts on any animal: the shank. When slow cooked for hours, the meat is extremely tender and flavorful, much similar to a chuck. There are 2 types of shanks: foreshanks and hindshanks. Foreshanks are the front 2 shanks of the animal, what you’d typically see in a grocery store or a restaurant. Hindshanks are the back 2 shanks of an animal. These are harder to find, mostly because they are still attached to the back legs of animals and sold as a whole leg, at least with lamb and pork. For this recipe, I will be using beef shanks. These are mostly known to the West as beef soup bones. This is a very inexpensive cut and should cost no more than $4lb. I recommend 1 shank per person. If you want to commit blasphemeat, you can find boneless beef shank meat at most Asian grocery stores. I personally prefer the bone. You get a lot of flavor from the marrow. Plus you know when the shanks are done when the meat is falling of the bone.
Servings: 4 people
Ingredients
- 4 beef shanks
- 3/4 lb Korean radish or any other root vegetable (parsnip, turnip, potato) cut into 1 inch cubes
- 1 medium carrot cut into 1/2 inch pieces
- 1/2 medium onion diced
- 2 green onions diced
- 1 head garlic peeled and left whole
- 4 thin slices of ginger
- 4 dried shittake mushrooms chopped
- 1 tsp crushed red pepper
Sauce
- 1/3 cup light soy sauce
- 1/4 cup rice wine
- 2 tbsp honey
- 1 tbsp sugar
- salt and pepper to taste
- 1 tbsp sesame oil
Garnish
- 2 green onion finely chopped
- 1 tsp toasted sesame seeds
Instructions
- Mix all the sauce ingredients together.
- Cut up all of the vegetables.
- Add all of the ingredients to a slow cooker. Add the sauce. Cook on high for 6 hours.
- Remove meat from the bone and add back to the pot. Serve. Garnish with green onions and sesame seeds. You can serve this on the bone if you like.
